PUBLIC SECRETS.

BY NORA ROBERTS.

PROLOGUE

Los Angeles, 1990

SHE SLAMMED ON THE brakes, ramming hard into the curb. The radio

continued to blare. She pressed both hands against her mouth to hold

back hysterical laughter. A blast from the past, the disk jockey had

called it. A blast from her past. Devastation was still rocking.

Somehow her brain functioned to take care of little matters: turn off

the ignition, take out the key, pull open the door. She was shaking in

the late evening heat. An earlier rain and rising temperatures caused

mist to spiral up from the pavement. She ran through it, looking

frantically right, left, back over her shoulder.

The dark. She'd nearly forgotten there were things that hid in the

dark.

The noise level rose as she pushed open the doors. The fluorescent

lights dazzled her eyes. She continued to run, knowing only that she

was terrified and someone, anyone, had to listen.

She raced along the hallway, her heart beating a hard tatoo. A dozen or

more phones were ringing; voices merged and mixed in complaints, shouts,

questions. Someone cursed in a low, continual stream. She saw the doors

marked Homicide and bit back a sob.

He was kicked back at his desk, one foot resting on a torn blotter, a

phone tucked between his shoulder and ear. A Styrofoam cup of coffee

was halfway to his lips.

"Please help me," she said, collapsing into the chair facing him.

"Someone's trying to kill me."

CHAPTER ONE

London,1967

THE FIRST time EMMA mET her father, she was nearly three years old. She

knew what he looked like because her mother kept pictures of him,

meticulously cut from newspapers and glossy magazines, on every surface

in their cramped three-room flat. Jane Palmer had a habit of carrying

her daughter, Emma, from picture to picture hanging on the water-stained

walls and sitting on the dusty scarred furniture and telling her of the

glorious love affair that had bloomed between herself and Brian McAvoy,

lead singer for the hot rock group, Devastation. The more Jane drank,

the greater that love became.

Emma understood only parts of what she was told. She knew that the man

in the pictures was important, that he and his band had played for the

queen. She had learned to recognize his voice when his songs came on

the radio, or when her mother put one of the 45s she collected on the

record player.

Emma liked his voice, and what she would learn later was called its

faint Irish lilt.

Some of the neighbors tut-tutted about the poor little girl upstairs

with a mother who had a fondness for the gin bottle and a vicious

temper. There were times they heard Jane's shrill curses and Emma's

sobbing walls. Their lips would firm and knowing looks would pa.s.s